About

I am an instructor, historian, and scholar living in Southern California. As an instructor, my goal is to equip students with the tools to engage in academic and civic life by deepening their understanding of the past and present. I am committed to student-centered, research-driven pedagogy and collaboration to promote student equity and success.

My research examines gender, anarchism, and intimate life in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century United States, with a particular focus on free love and domesticity. I take an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on feminist theory, disability theory, and critical geography. My current book project, tentatively titled Intimate Experiments: Free Love, Domesticity, and Feminism in the American Anarchist Movement, 1880-1920, examines anarchist-feminists’ attempts to revolutionize intimate life through free love and sex radicalism, and how those attempts were sometimes stymied by gender norms even within this radical milieu. I have found that the stakes of these experiments were significantly different for men and women, particularly when it came to free love and domesticity. Although anarchists sought to reimagine intimate life in opposition to the state, their families and relationships were nevertheless heavily shaped by gendered norms and American ideals of domesticity.

My second research project explores how late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century radical leftists framed and utilized ideas of “nature” as well as how the natural world fit into their politics, particularly for those living outside of urban centers.